Annie Oakley (1860-1926). Standing barely five feet tall, Annie Oakley toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show for 17 years after joining it in 1885. While on European tour, and at the invitation of German Crown Prince Wilhelm (later Kaiser Wilhelm II) Annie shot a cigarette from his lips; she was also known to sever a playing card, thin edge facing her, at 90 feet. Many of her records established with pistols, rifles and shotguns remain unequaled to this day. (Harbaugh, P., 1982)
Kurt Kranz was born at Emmerich on the Rhine in 1910 and joined the Bauhaus in 1930. In 1950 he became an Assistant Professor to the Hamburg Academy of Art. During much of the 1930s, Kranz headed Herbert Bayer's Dorland Studio in Berlin. He held a number of visiting professor or similar positions in the United States: Tulane University (1957-1958); University of California, Santa Barbara (1965); Academy of Honolulu(1966); Nihon University, Tokyo; and Harvard (1967-1968). The Chammber of the Turk series of watercolors were included in the circulation exhibition by the Smithsonian Institute 1973-1975 entitled "kurt kranz bauhaus and today."
